How Do People Look For A Job After Being Fired?

When you get fired, no one has to know. Never use the words fired or quit in describing a previous job. You left. You can say that you were laid off, if the layoff made the papers. There isn’t a major stigma to being caught in an impersonal layoff. If you were personally fired on the other hand, your story is that you left voluntarily and, if the ex-employer contradicts that, then you need to get a lawyer involved and sue the shit out of them.

Unless you did something unethical — so unethical that the story can’t be contained and your reputation is ruined — getting fired is no big deal. No one knows, no one will know, and few people really care.

The only thing you have to overcome is the fact that it’s harder to get a job when you are unemployed than when you have one. There are a few solutions.

Lie. Represent yourself as still employed at the company. (Sometimes this is offered in the severance package. You did negotiate a package, right? If you don’t need cash, settle for a contractually-obligated positive reference and the right to represent yourself as employed, but never go away for free.) Some people think this style of “lie” is unethical. I don’t. If you want to represent yourself as employed, do it. If they ask whether they can call your “current” employer for a reference, say “No, because I still work there.” You will have to adjust your dates-of-employment to what they actually were in the future, because few companies will want you if you’re this cagey about your second-to-last employer, but the odds that you’ll be caught in this inconsistency (in reports to two different parties that shouldn’t be speaking to each other) are low. Now, there are two problems with this approach. The first is that you may get caught anyway, and many companies take a zero-tolerance approach to resume/job-search lies. The response you want is, “My dates of employment were still under negotiation at that time, and in any case, that discrepancy that you perceive has nothing to do with my qualifications.” Technically speaking, you can only be fired “for cause” if the CV lie pertains to your suitability for the work, which in this case it doesn’t (it’s a social status lie). If, for example, you claim to have Mayflower ancestry when interviewing at an investment bank, and it’s later shown that you don’t, this isn’t legal cause for termination because it doesn’t pertain to your ability to do the work. Practically speaking, people can be fired for pretty much anything (at-will employment). If it’s HR that catches you, you might be able to save yourself by remind them that this lie isn’t legal cause for termination. If your boss feels he can’t trust you anymore, you’re cooked regardless of legality. The second problem is that, while it is very unlikely that you will be caught, maintaining a complex story imposes a cognitive load that will make you, at least on a subconscious level, seem less genuine. Unless you have a really bad history to overcome, you should tell something close to the truth in job searches just for reasons of complexity reduction. So, I don’t recommend this strategy in general. It’s dangerous and often unnecessary.

The “health card.” What if you have a long (6+ months) gap to overcome? The magic words are resolved health issues. It’s a common enough occurrence that it doesn’t look bad on you, and questions will stop immediately. Emphasize resolved. As in, “This problem won’t come back.” You can’t use this on a short gap (less than three months) because most legitimately job-ending health problems aren’t resolved that quickly.

Freelance. Pick up some freelance work. Volunteer if you can’t get paid for it. Do freebies if you must. The fact that you’re actually doing a lot of your work for free is irrelevant, and if you’re asked what your rate is (an unlikely question), it can be whatever number you want it to be. (You’re just giving some clients a 100% discount. That’s a private matter between you and them.) You now have a story for why you left your previous firm. You wanted to try out freelancing, and you did, and you’ve had some successful projects, but now you’re looking for more stability, and you believe the problems your prospective employer is working on are probably more challenging than what you’ve done as a freelancer.

Wing it. Never say you were fired, but you can admit that you left the previous job, and represent yourself as currently unemployed. That won’t hurt you as much as some people think, so it may be better to stick to a mostly true representation: you left voluntarily (the untrue part you need to keep) and are now unemployed (which is true). As I said, the danger in lying isn’t getting caught, but the cognitive load of keeping up a lie, which can pollute relationships. Now, the problems you face while unemployed are (a) some companies will take longer to make decisions, because your time isn’t perceived as valuable, and you may have to do a couple of god-awful follow-on interviews to help them make up their mind, (b) you can’t use the “don’t contact my current employer” line to hide a bad reference because you don’t have a current employer, and (c) you’re unlikely to get much of a raise or promotion, because you have no leverage, whereas with an employed candidate, the prospective firm is already in an implicit bidding war with the current employer.

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